UPCOMING EVENTS

NoSQL databases — developed for the storage, analysis, and access of unstructured data — represent a large and growing chunk of the overall database management system (DBMS) market. According to a report published by Allied Market Research, they’ll generate a collective $4.2 billion in revenue by 2020, and analysts at Forrester peg the segment’s growth at 25 percent from 2015 to 2021.

ArangoDB, a Cologne, Germany-based startup founded in 2014 by OnVista veterans Claudius Weinberger and Frank Celler, wisely took advantage of the favorable climate to seek out fresh capital. Today the company announced that it has secured $10 million in series A funding led by Bow Capital, with participation from existing investor Target Partners, bringing its total capital raised to over $16 million. Bow Capital advisor Murat Sönmez will join ArangoDB’s board of directors.

The cash infusion comes after ArangoDB moved its headquarters to the U.S. — its fastest-growing market — and will fuel the expansion of its various global teams, according to CEO Weinberger. The company plans to grow its engineering, sales, marketing, and human resources divisions in the U.S., while its Cologne office will continue to lead software and product development.

“We created ArangoDB to give developers freedom when building their applications — if [developers] want to adapt or extend their data access patterns, they can do so by simply changing a query, instead of their entire infrastructure,” Weinberger said. “Developers should use the right data model for the right job.”

ArangoDB’s eponymous, C++-based platform uniquely supports key/value, document, and graph data models in a single database, and it offers features like synchronous replication and automatic failover. It can be used as a transactional document store managed with ArangoDB’s query language, AQL, and searched with a built-in full-text engine with similarity ranking capabilities. Perhaps most importantly, it’s speedy. ArangoDB claims that in a cluster with 640 virtual CPUs, ArangoDB can sustain a write-load of up to 1.1 million JSON documents (about 1GB) per second.

ArangoDB competes for market share with other open source graph databases, including (but certainly not limited to) Redis, InfiniteGraph, OrientDB, InfoGrid, Dex, HyperGraphDB, BigData, and OQGraph. But ArangoDB says that this past year its framework notched more than 7 million downloads on GitHub and 7,000 “stargazers” (users who’ve bookmarked its repository). It adds that more than 500 organizations worldwide — including Airbus, Cisco, Egress, Barclays, SAP, Concur, and Thomson Reuters — actively use it in production.

“Application developers have been held hostage for years by traditional database vendors,” said Bow Capital and Tibco software founder Vivek Ranadivé. “With ArangoDB, developers no longer face the painful trade-off between choosing a single database model or maintaining multiple databases — they can have the best of both worlds.”

ArangoDB is Weinberger’s and Celler’s second venture. In 2004, they cofounded their first startup, database consulting company triAgens, where they worked on NoSQL solutions for 15 years. They say the team they’ve assembled at ArangoDB cut their teeth at the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext, German Postal Service, DHL, and several international banks.

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